Dev Tools

If you've been living under a rock, Dokploy is the self-hosted PaaS that quietly shipped a UI that makes Coolify look like phpMyAdmin. Spoiler: I switched my side-project VPS to it last weekend and didn't look back.

The Setup

One curl, one Docker, one VPS. I spun it up on a $6 Hetzner box from my M4 Mac in about four minutes flat. The dashboard is clean — proper spacing, real typography, no neon green on black.

curl -sSL https://dokploy.com/install.sh | sh

# point a domain, then deploy from a compose file
cat > docker-compose.yml <<'YAML'
services:
  web:
    image: ghcr.io/aidxn/astro-site:latest
    ports: ["3000:3000"]
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=production
YAML

dokploy app create astro-site --compose ./docker-compose.yml

The Money Pattern

The killer feature is the deploy preview flow. Push a branch, get a URL, share it with a client. For my multi-tenant SaaS work at Rebuild Relief this matters — I can spin a preview branch for Supabase migrations without touching Netlify or burning a Pipedrive sandbox.

# .dokploy/preview.yml
preview:
  enabled: true
  branch_pattern: "feat/*"
  env:
    SUPABASE_URL: ${SUPABASE_URL_PREVIEW}
    SUPABASE_ANON_KEY: ${SUPABASE_ANON_KEY_PREVIEW}
  cleanup_after: 7d

The Catch

The community is a fraction of Coolify's. Plot twist: that means fewer plugins, fewer templates, fewer Stack Overflow answers. The docs are improving but they're not Coolify-deep yet. If you need a niche stack supported tomorrow, Coolify still wins on raw breadth.

The Verdict

For a clean, opinionated, self-hosted PaaS you'll actually enjoy looking at every day, Dokploy is the new default. Coolify can stay on the homelab for the kitchen-sink projects. For everything I ship solo, Dokploy now.